Cleopatra Bardaki

Deploying RFID-Enabled Services in the Retail Supply Chain: Lessons Learned toward the Internet of Things

Through this research the authors communicate the lessons learned during the deployment of two RFID retail applications—namely dynamic pricing of fresh products and management of promotions in the supermarket floor—in two real-life pilot sites in Greece and Ireland. The lessons are presented in three inter-related perspectives; engineering challenges and associated solutions, individual adoption factors, and organizational success indicators. The authors argue that these findings might inform the design community to develop better RFID instantiations.

Modeling the information completeness of object tracking systems

We propose an analytical model that evaluates the information completeness of object tracking systems based on their size, breadth and reading depth. We showcase that the larger size of a systems configuration does not ensure better completeness; instead, the effect of reading depth is greater. The completeness of tracking information can characterize the visibility of the inspected objects the tracking systems offer. The model may be used for both ex-ante and ex-post evaluations of the visibility of tracking systems versus their deployment cost, considering that the emergence of real-time tracking and sensing technologies will boost the adoption of such systems.

Warehouse contextual factors affecting the impact of RFID

Purpose – Empowered by the possibility to automatically identify unique instances, radio frequency identification (RFID) is expected to revolutionize warehouse processes. However, every warehouse differs from each other in several ways. Given such dimensionality, a credible assessment of the true value of RFID requires that the contextual factors that differentiate one warehouse from another are taken into account. The same RFID implementation may generate high productivity in one warehouse but not in another, because the former warehouse may have characteristics that may influence the impact of RFID. As a result, the purpose of this paper is to provide a framework for identifying key contextual factors that appear to be contingent on the link between RFID and warehouse performance.Design/methodology/approach – The framework derived from a two‐phase research design. The first phase incorporated two case studies. This was an exploratory study and, therefore, there was a great deal of iteration between the ...

A Systematic Approach for the Design of RFID Implementations in the Supply Chain

This paper presents a step-by-step approach to design realistic RFID-enabled application scenarios and services in terms of two decision variables. The first one lies in the aspect of technical feasibility; that is to decide on technical issues (e.g. the location of the RFID readers) and the second one includes a cost-benefit assessment; that is to recognise the extent to which the potential benefits gained from RFID outweigh the value of investment and suggest a cost-effective implementation. To better illustrate the approach, the paper describes work undertaken for the design of the dynamic pricing service, relying on RFID technology in order to monitor a productpsilas expiration date and dynamically adjust its price.

IoT-enabled gamification for energy conservation in public buildings

Public buildings are a particularly challenging category of buildings to address for energy conservation due to lack of occupant motives and lack of individual accountability among others. In this paper, we describe an IoT-enabled gamification approach to change energy-consumption behaviors and reduce energy waste in public buildings. This will be assisted by the energy-consumption disaggregation at the device and at the individual employee levels through the design of an IoT infrastructure consisting of multi-channel smart meters, NFC tags, BLE beacons and the user smartphones. Based on our approach, employees will be motivated to improve their energy-consumption behaviors by means of peer-pressure based on a team competition and by means of direct (non-monetary) rewards.

21 – Radio frequency identification (RFID) as a catalyst for improvements in food supply chain operations

Abstract: The objective of effective supply chain management is the coordination of information, materials and financial flows between organisations. The recent trends of globalisation, consumer pressure for responsiveness and reliability, and intense competition in the global trading community have made effective supply chain management a very challenging issue. New information technologies are promising for optimising supply chain operations and solving many related issues. Indeed, supply chain management information systems have greatly benefited companies that use them, minimising information processing costs and raising great potentials like information sharing and fast communication that were not feasible before. RFID is an emerging technology that can further contribute to supply chain optimisation. RFID enables accurate real time product location information provision in high volumes and at very low (or even zero) labour costs. This chapter looks closely into the technology of RFID and the way it is employed in supply chain management and, particularly, in the food supply chain by describing two applications. The first describes the requirements’ analysis, development and pilot implementation of a RFID-enabled traceability system for a company that deals with frozen food. The second describes a distributed, service-oriented architecture that supports RFID-integrated decision support and collaboration practices in a networked business environment. In the context of retail industry, a RFID-integrated ‘dynamic pricing’ service is described regarding its functionality and implementation. Several considerations from the cases are presented which could provide valuable feedback to other organisations interested in moving to a RFID-based scheme.

Retail business analytics: Customer visit segmentation using market basket data

Abstract Basket analytics is a powerful tool in the retail context for acquiring knowledge about consumer shopping habits and preferences. In this paper, we propose a business analytics approach that mines customer visit segments from basket sales data. We characterize a customer visit by the purchased product categories in the basket and identify the shopping intention or mission behind the visit e.g. a ‘breakfast’ visit to purchase cereal, milk, bread, cheese etc. We also suggest a semi-supervised feature selection approach that uses the product taxonomy as input and suggests customized categories as output. This approach is utilized to balance the product taxonomy tree that has a significant effect on the data mining results. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by applying it to a real case of a major European fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) retailer. Apart from its theoretical contribution, the proposed approach extracts knowledge that may support several decisions ranging from marketing campaigns per customer segment, redesign of a stores layout to product recommendations.